IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/halshs-00691471.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Financial and Income Losses From Illness Shock in China: Results From Surveys in Eight Provinces

Author

Listed:
  • Martine Audibert

    (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - UdA - Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Xiao Xian Huang

    (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - UdA - Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Jacky Mathonnat

    (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - UdA - Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Aurore Pelissier

    (CERDI - Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Développement International - UdA - Université d'Auvergne - Clermont-Ferrand I - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

An illness shock may cause two kinds of economic losses: the direct financial loss mainly due to medical spending and the indirect economic loss due to the reduction of income. This article studies the illness burden in China between 1990 and 2000 by analyzing, at the same time, the direct medical cost and the indirect income loss. The analyses are conducted in two steps. First, a quintile analysis is used to assess the level and the distribution of health financing burden across the population. Second a fixed-effect panel model is used to capture the effect of illness shock on households' long-term income. The paper highlights the increase of households' health financial burden in the 1990s, as well as its unequal distribution among income groups. The data suggest that, despite of an increase in coverage between 1991 and 1997, the insurance system actually failed to protect the poor against catastrophic medical expenditure. A significant negative effect of illness shock on long-term income is captured by the chronic illness indicator but not by the general illness indicator, which suggests that chronic illnesses, compared to non-chronic illnesses, may induce additional income loss. The paper also shows that the effect of illness shock varies by region and working status: urban households are more vulnerable to long-term income effect of illness than rural ones; people with more flexible work (self-employees and collective companies' employees) are more likely to cope with the health shock than people with less flexible work (private or state companies' employees) and the unemployed. Finally, insurance membership turned out to have no effect on the protection of households against the loss of income due to health shocks.

Suggested Citation

  • Martine Audibert & Xiao Xian Huang & Jacky Mathonnat & Aurore Pelissier, 2012. "Financial and Income Losses From Illness Shock in China: Results From Surveys in Eight Provinces," Post-Print halshs-00691471, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00691471
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00691471. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.